Padmapper Makes Apartment Hunting Easier

Padmapper takes Craigslist rental listings and puts them on a Google map to make them easier to visualize, browse, and filter based on rent, keyword, pet-friendliness, or even distance to mass transit.

Shopping for apartments on Craigslist or Apartments.com can yield some great results, especially if you're looking for landlords who are renting properties they own and are flexible with lease terms and rent rates. If you're looking to rent a house or a condo instead of an apartment, Craigslist is one of your best tools, but the site leaves much to be desired when it comes to search. It's difficult to search for housing in specific neighborhoods, or for housing that's close to public transit or shopping or even to your workplace.

That's where Padmapper comes in. The service takes Craigslist rental listings and puts them on a Google map to make them easier to visualize, browse, and filter based on rent, keyword, pet-friendliness, or even distance to mass transit.

Padmapper is a pretty straight forward Google Maps mashup. Each pinpoint on the map represents a listing on Craigslist for housing. You can click on the pin to open a balloon that shows you everything you need to know about the listing. The title is a link to the actual post on Craigslist, and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms is listed in the balloon. Additionally, you can see the address, how fresh the listing is, and browse photos of the unit if they're available. The listing balloon also has the poster's Craigslist-generated e-mail address and their phone number if you want to give them a call.

Since Padmapper is a Google Maps mashup, you can also save the location to your favorite locations in Google Maps, or click to see the place from the ground through Google Street View. Also, since the entire screen is a Google Map (there are no borders, either - the site turns your entire Web browser into a map of your city), you can simply click and drag the map around to see more listings in different neighborhoods. If you have a good group of favorites saved, you can toggle the favorites sidebar on the right side of the screen to browse through them.

If you're looking for a specific city, or want to go from one city to another, you can type the name of the city into the translucent Padmapper window hovering in the lower left corner of the window. If you expand the window, you get an overlay that gives you more control over the housing results displayed on the map. You can drag a slider to indicate what your minimum or maximum rent is, and the site will automatically update to add or remove listings based on your preference.

There are similar sliders for your preferred number of bedrooms, minimum number of bedrooms, and price per bedroom. You can also control the finer elements of the results, like the maximum age of the listings. The default is set to show entries no older than 7 days, for example.

The site also lets you toggle listings on and off that are pet-friendly, have photos in the listing, or are for rent by owner. Padmapper also sources some listings from Apartments.com, so you can toggle those on and off as well as the Craigslist listings. If you're searching for a specific listing, or want only houses versus apartments, you can also filter on keyword.

Padmapper puts an interesting spin on a tool that I think everyone who's shopped for an apartment or rental home in the past couple of years has used. The last time I looked for apartments, I actually wound up steering clear of Craigslist because sites like Apartments.com were simply easier to use and navigate, and they allowed me to specify things I wanted and filter out things I didn't want to see. Since Padmapper offers a little more control as well as an overhead map that makes it easy to choose your neighborhood or estimate your commute, it's almost worth using it instead of Craigslist entirely.

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